"Ill!" retorts a male bystander indignantly, "Ill! 'E's 'ad too much
of what I ain't 'ad enough of."

Dickens suffered from too little of what some of us have too much of-
-criticism. His work met with too little resistance to call forth
his powers. Too often his pathos sinks to bathos, and this not from
want of skill, but from want of care. It is difficult to believe
that the popular writer who allowed his sentimentality--or rather the
public's sentimentality--to run away with him in such scenes as the
death of Paul Dombey and Little Nell was the artist who painted the
death of Sidney Carton and of Barkis, the willing. The death of
Barkis, next to the passing of Colonel Newcome, is, to my thinking,
one of the most perfect pieces of pathos in English literature. No
very deep emotion is concerned. He is a commonplace old man,
clinging foolishly to a commonplace box. His simple wife and the old
boatmen stand by, waiting calmly for the end. There is no straining
after effect. One feels death enter, dignifying all things; and
touched by that hand, foolish old Barkis grows great.

In Uriah Heap and Mrs. Gummidge, Dickens draws types rather than
characters. Pecksniff, Podsnap, Dolly Varden, Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Gamp,
Mark Tapley, Turveydrop, Mrs. Jellyby--these are not characters; they
are human characteristics personified.

We have to go back to Shakespeare to find a writer who, through
fiction, has so enriched the thought of the people. Admit all
Dickens' faults twice over, we still have one of the greatest writers
of modern times. Such people as these creations of Dickens never
lived, says your little critic. Nor was Prometheus, type of the
spirit of man, nor was Niobe, mother of all mothers, a truthful